William Penn Bank Sows Good Will

William Penn Bank Sows Good Will

As the second oldest bank in Pennsylvania and the namesake of the Commonwealth’s deeply religious founder, William Penn Bank has a storied tradition of sowing good “Will.”

From its earliest days, the Tullytown-based bank operated upon the honor system. Reconstruction-era farmers dropped their hard-earned cash into a glorified box in rural Bucks County and calculated their own change, with their earnings derived from the sale of their hay, grain and potato crops in Philadelphia and New York. More than 140 years later, the bank’s assets, prestige and community ties have skyrocketed exponentially and transformed this one-time “farmers” bank, planted amidst the swaying cornfields of scenic Bucks County, into a state-of-the-art institution with four modern branches in the growing, tech-savvy suburbs of the City of Brotherly Love.

The bank was born in 1870, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, when steel and iron mills, coal mining, shipbuilding and railroading took off faster than a Miley Cyrus video, and young people abandoned agriculture en masse for industry. U.S. Steel was a major presence in the area and the bank grew astride its towering silver shadow. With that segue from farm to factory came a demand for housing. William Penn Bank was there, an already-trusted fixture and friend, to fill the need.

Fast forward to 2013, with the bank now operating two branches in Levittown—the gritty, prototypical town where modern suburbia took its earliest form—one branch in Morrisville, and one in upscale Richboro.

William Penn Bank is a Bucks County tradition in a land steeped in tradition.

Read the full article in November’s issue of Transactions. Aren’t a subscriber? Visit the Transactions page on this website or call PACB at 717-231-7447 to start receiving the magazine.